[Corpora-List] LREC post-conference workshop "XML-based richly annotated corpora"

[Andreas Witt]

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   FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS

               Workshop on

      XML-based richly annotated corpora


   http://coli.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/forschung/xbrac/

   LREC post-conference workshop
   Centro Cultural de Belem, LISBON, Portugal, 29th May 2004

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Call for Papers

XML has become a de facto standard for the representation of corpus
resources. It is being used for representing speech and text
corpora, multimodal and multimedial corpora, as well as, in
particular, integrated corpora which combine different
modalities. XML-based representations make it easier to work with
richly annotated corpora, which include annotations from different
levels of linguistic description or from different modalities. A
number of tools have also become available, over the last few years,
for creating, managing, annotating, querying such corpora and for
their statistical exploration.

Although XML is a useful representation language, its use alone does
not solve all the problems and choices with respect to the
representation style (e.g. stand-off annotations vs. embedded
annotations); these are in turn closely linked with questions of the
architecture of richly annotated corpora, such as the following:
should information from different levels of linguistic description
be represented in separate "layers" of the annotation? Should a
given information type serve as a grounding for all or some of the
others? How to account for interdependencies and interaction between
phenomena from different levels of description? How to account for
concurrent annotation (one phenomenon, different analyses or
theories/approaches)?

Such questions and the pertaining corpus-architectural
considerations interact with at least two more problem areas: on the
one hand with the kinds of research questions and of phenomena to be
analysed in linguistic and natural interaction research (which may
call for certain architectural solutions), and on the other hand
with tools for the creation, annotation, manipulation and
exploration of XML-based corpora.

The workshop will attempt to address the interplay between the
following research areas:

    1. XML techniques for corpus representation, i.e. :

           * Standoff annotation vs. embedded annotation;
           * Use of XML linking standards for language data (XLink,
             XPointer, XPath); other ways of ensuring relationships
             between levels, e.g. through naming conventions;
           * Concepts of layering in corpora annotated at several
             levels of linguistic description; types of information
             grouped together vs. distributed over different
             "packages"
           * Hierarchical vs. flat annotation;
           * the grounding of annotations (e.g. in XML elements vs.
             in characters?) and its implications;
           * techniques for the manipulation of XML-based
             representations for massively annotated corpora;
             usefulness and relevance of XQuery.
    2. Levels of linguistic description and their interaction, i.e.:

           * Examples of richly annotated corpora: reasons for the
             choice of the annotated levels; linguistic and natural
             interactivity research questions which can (only) be
             solved with richly annotated data;
           * Interaction between levels: new research questions in
             linguistics and natural interactivity research which
             can only be addressed because of observation across
             levels, across modalities, etc. An example is the use
             of clustering techniques across different levels: e.g.
             relevant cooccurrences of phenomena from different
             levels identified via clustering;
           * Use and usefulness of concurrent annotations in
             XML-based corpora; an example is concurrent flat and
             deep syntactic analysis.

    3. Tools for handling richly annotated corpora: Software
       solutions for, e.g.,

           * corpus creation, transformation, exchange, and
             validation
           * interactive annotation;
           * exploration: query and retrieval, statistical analysis;
           * corpus management (e.g. wrt. meta-data).

       Tools presented should be positioned with respect to the
       questions of corpus architecture and with respect to the
       research directions discussed above under (1) and (2).

The workshop aims at bringing together XML experts, both theorists
and practitioners, as well as linguists and natural interactivity
researchers working on the definition of corpus architectures,
annotation and resource exchange schemes and on tools for the use of
multilevel and/or multi-layer annotated corpora. It will provide a
forum for the definition of requirements for corpus representations
and pertaining tools, discussing at the same time case studies from
linguistics and natural interactivity research.

Organisers

     * Andreas Witt, Bielefeld University
     * Ulrich Heid, University of Stuttgart
     * Henry S. Thompson, University of Edinburgh
     * Jean Carletta, University of Edinburgh
     * Peter Wittenburg, MPI for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen

Program committee

     * Jean Carletta, University of Edinburgh, UK
     * Ulrich Heid, University of Stuttgart, Germany
     * Henning Lobin, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Germany
     * Dieter Metzing, Bielefeld University, Germany
     * Joakim Nivre, Växjö University, Sweden
     * Vito Pirrelli, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale
       del CNR, Pisa, Italy
     * Gary Simons, SIL International, Taxas, USA
     * Henry S. Thompson, University of Edinburgh, UK
     * Jun'ichi Tsujii, University of Tokyo, Japan
     * Andreas Witt, Bielefeld University, Germany
     * Peter Wittenburg, MPI for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen,
       Netherlands

Submissions
Authors are invited to submit papers for oral presentation in any of
the areas listed above. Only full papers will be accepted, and the
length of the paper should not exceed 8 pages.

Requirements for Paper Submission:

     * Submissions must be full papers, not extended abstracts.
     * It is highly recommendedauthors submit papers in the LREC-conference
       proceedings format (maximum of 8 pages).
     * Submission in other formats will be accepted (font sizes of 11 or 12
       point), however they can be no longer than eight (8) pages including
       figures, tables, and references, formatted for A4-paper with reasonable
       margins.
     * Electronic submission of manuscripts (details in the submission site) is
       required (PDF preferred, Postscript, and ASCII accepted).
     * An additional title page should include the title, author(s),
       affiliation(s), contact email address, postal address, telephone, fax and
       URL as well as five keywords.

Submission should be sent by email, to andreas.witt at uni-bielefeld.de before
15th February 2004.